Tony Gilroy on Pedro Pascal, ‘Behemoth!,’ and How Disney Never Told Him Not to Discuss Fascism During ‘Andor’ Press

Tony Gilroy hadn’t directed a feature film in 14 years, until this year’s New York Film Festival world premiere “Behemoth!,” starring Pedro Pascal. The Oscar-nominated “Michael Clayton” director had, after all, spent the last six years showrunning Disney+’s “Andor,” which ended last year with its second and final season. “Behemoth!” returns the writer/director to the realm of midbudget movies for smart adults, starring Pedro Pascal as a cellist for movie scores in Los Angeles after years on the road — and years of up-and-down, in-and-out romantic and personal relationships. On Tuesday, October 6, Gilroy joined IndieWire Editor-at-Large Anne Thompson and IndieWire Executive Editor Ryan Lattanzio for the annual “Screen Talk” Live podcast at the New York Film Festival. The lively, wide-ranging chat unpacked the making of “Behemoth!,” including how Gilroy assembled the collective of nine composers who wrote the film’s score: Michael Abels, Emily Bear, Lukas Frank, Michael Giacchino, Henry Jackman, Nami Melumad, James Newton Howard, Brandon Roberts, and Alan Silvestri. (He explained during our talk how they’re getting closer to Best Original Score eligibility despite Academy rules capping composers at three.) Gilroy also talked about casting Pedro Pascal after Oscar Isaac’s schedule forced him to leave the role — and how Pascal learned the cello to play in camera for the scoring-session scenes. Plus, Olivia Wilde as a “Fatal Attraction” type obsessive former paramour and “Sorry Baby” director Eva Victor as a younger string player form the network of women populating (and complicating) his life, while Will Arnett plays Pascal’s estranged, dissipated brother — also a musician. Elsewhere during the live podcast, Gilroy also cleared up reports that Disney advised him not to mention “fascism” during press for the politically charged “Andor,” a “Star Wars” show deeply steeped in cautionary messaging about authoritarianism. Gilroy said this wasn’t the case. (A recent story in The Hollywood Reporter claimed that the “Andor” creative team was encouraged not to draw parallels between current politics and the series.) “You watch how these stories [become] clickbait and get reported and the rest of it. One thing that is absolutely not true is no one ever told me or Diego [Luna] or Genevieve [O’Reilly] or anybody who’s outside, no one ever said, ‘Don’t do this,’ or, ‘Don’t do that.’ … No one in PR ever said, ‘Don’t do this.’ Now, there’s times where we would tip over to the edge, and people would go, ‘Hey, man, you know, be careful.’ But no one ever told us what to do. … The parallels to the show were becoming undeniably weird to go into an interview and talk about. And we went out early and, and we sorta came back, and we’re like, ‘Holy shit, man. We gotta figure out what to do about this.'” He continued, “We never lied. We were never cynical. We felt it was legit to tease out what we thought about and why we made the show as it went along, and it didn’t seem fair to Disney to burn a bonfire in the middle of the parking lot. We didn’t have to. The show was doing that for us. You know what I mean? The show was saying everything that we wanted to say. Uh, but as time went on, you know, we became more liberated … But no one ever told us what to do. It was reported the other way, which is wrong.” Listen to the episode below or on your preferred podcast platform.